Abstract:

Wellness is one of today's prominent megatrends influencing people's consumption motives. It shows as consumers' increased orientation towards wellness, as well as increased supply of wellness related products and services. This paper investigates the wellness phenomenon in the specific context of media consumption. While motives of media consumption in general have been widely studied in communication research, wellness themed media content has not yet received much academic attention. The purpose of this study is to examine the motives that drive the consumption of wellness themed media content, and to identify distinct consumer groups based on these motives. Further, this study seeks to examine the relation between the different motives of wellness media consumption and consumers' wellness orientation.

The theoretical background of the research subject is drawn from the extant literature on the uses & gratifications of media consumption, the relation between media consumption and health in general, and wellness orientation. Data was collected using a web-based survey, during fall 2014. Invitation to the questionnaire was sent to the target group, which was active Finnish speaking consumers of wellness media, and altogether 224 completed responses were received. The data was then analyzed using two primary multivariate data analysis techniques: factor analysis and cluster analysis. Factor analysis was first applied to identify underlying structures within the motives of wellness media consumption, and to prepare the data for cluster analysis. Next, cluster analysis was used to identify consumer groups based on their wellness media consumption motives. To further examine the differences in wellness orientation between the clusters, analysis of variance was applied.

Three main motives of wellness media consumption are proposed by the results: Information & Learning, Social Integration & Interaction, and Entertainment. Further, four consumer groups of wellness media are identified: Socially motivated consumers, Entertainment-seekers, Indifferent consumers and Information oriented consumers. As for the relation between the motives and wellness orientation, the findings indicate that social and information motives would be more strongly associated with higher wellness orientation than entertainment motives. The main contribution of this paper is in adding to the understanding of consumer behavior in the context of wellness media consumption. While offering valuable insight to the research subject, the findings also indicate that further research is needed in order to fully understand the motives of wellness media consumption and their relation to wellness orientation.